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This article was originally written for a paranormal magazine called The Paranormal Journal, it became known as The Underground Files covering ghosts, ufos, cryptozoology, and government conspiracies amongst others. I no longer write for the magazine and it is no longer in existence. Four Winged Dinosaur Found in China The strangest fossiled dinosaur found in China, may have glided from tree to tree. Two sets of feather wings on its forelimbs, the others on its hind legs, called Microraptor gui, in honour of Gu Zhiwel. It was 2½ feet long. Just where the creature fits into the evolution of birds and dinosaurs is uncertain, researchers suggest it developed around the same time, perhaps even later than the first two-wing bird like dinosaur, the Archaeopteryx, believed to have learned to fly by using, yeah, its wings, flapping them to be exact. Paleontologists were intrigued having seen gliding dinosaurs before but not one with feathers nor one with four wings. “It would be a total oddity - the weirdest creature in the world of dinosaurs and birds,” said Luis Chiappe, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. He did not participate in the dig. Scientists said the fossils, actually discovered in the Chinese province Liaoning, northeast of Beijing, a site that has given many important specimens in recent years, have revived a debate between two theories of how dinosaurs might have developed into birds. One theory states some of these apparent bird ancestors learned to flap their wings powering flight, while they glided from tree to tree; the other suggesting they learned to fly by increasing their running speed with their wings and taking off from the ground. The latest discovery seems to support the gliding from trees. “It's a phenomenal find,” Chiappe said. “We don't have anything that resembles this in the whole dinosaur and bird spectrum.” Paleontologist Xing Xu of the institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences described six fossils with leg feathers arranged in a pattern similar to wing feathers in modern birds. “They are long and have asymmetrical veins like flight feathers,” Xu said. The feathered legs amount to rear wings, Xu said. It is reckoned this could represent an intermediate stage of development before the emergence of true flight powered by flapping wings, or the feathered legs could have been an evolutionary dead end, other researchers said. Scientists believe the Mircoraptor gui probably did not fly by flapping its wings, because of the way the rear legs are set in the hip sockets and because the rear legs would have confronted turbulence from flapping front wings, suggesting both wings were used for flying, Chiappe surmised. However, Ken Dial, head of a biological flight laboratory at the University of Montana, suggests there is room for both gliding and flapping dinosaurs in evolutionary history. “Gliding represents a splendid example of convergent evolution,” Dial said. “We should not be surprised to unearth gliding dinosaurs as we have numerous living-day examples of gliders in nearly all the vertebrate groups - reptiles, mammals, birds and including parachuting amphibians.” Last week, Dial reported in the journal Science, that the way young birds such as turkeys and quails use their wings could suggest ancient birds eventually learned to fly by running and flapping. A University of Chicago paleontologist, Paul Sereno, stated the best way to find out whether Microraptor gui was an intermediate stage in bird evolution or a dead end is to find other dinosaur fossils with feathered legs. Sereno called Xu a landmark paper but added, “Whether this represents an intermediate form that all birds passed through is a question that's going to be hotly debated.” Four Winged Dinosaur Found in China written by Bill Barber |
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